26 de janeiro de 2014

According to a new study from children’s entertainment research and consulting group PlayCollective and Digital Book World, 67% of U.S. children aged two-to-thirteen are now reading ebooks. That’s up from 54%, the number recorded in a similar study from last year.

“In the last year, based on this research, the kids e-reading and reached and passed a tipping point,” said Paul Levine, co-CEO of PlayCollective. “This is becoming a normal part of their lives and becoming habitual.”

Developing digital solutions for non-narrative content is still a challenge for publishers, according to experts taking part in a discussion of those issues at Digital Book World 2014 in New York this afternoon.That’s true despite significant technological advances. Nathan Myhrvold’s The Modernist Cuisine was one of Inkling Habitat’s big successes for the interactive publishing platform in 2013. But according to Gus Gostyla, vice president of partnerships at Inkling, at the time Myhrvold came forward with the project, “there was no platform that could possibly do that piece of work justice–in his mind.”

The publishing industry has bought into this idea wholesale. Some publishing markets are, according to this worldview, further ahead on the progress timeline than others. It also implies that advancement along the timeline is inevitable, even if it progresses at varying speeds. Romance and other genre fiction tend to dominate ebook sales and so must have more ‘future’. Non-fiction less so and must therefore have less ‘future’ and more of that crippling ballast called ‘past’. Big mainstream titles hit the ebook market in seemingly unpredictable ways. Some garner decent ebook sales while others seem to sell only in print. There, the ‘future’ seems to be randomly distributed, like a stress nosebleed over a term paper.This, obviously, implies that the ebook will either eventually dominate universally or at least capture the same large percentage uniformly across the market.I don’t think that’s going to happen.

How much should you pay for an ebook? $9.99? $0.99? $0? And how much should you price your ebooks? I’m going to tell you what people have actually paid for their ebooks, based on some hard data from Luzme. You can set the price of your book to be anything you want; what really matters is what someone will pay for it!Last year, Luzme captured a large amount of ebook price data and reader pricing preferences. I am analysing this data and will share any interesting results.

A revolutionary concept in fostering free use of books launched only a few years ago with GlueJar’s Unglue.it model. This model relied on crowdfunding to propel a book into Creative Commons status, essentially paying the rights holder an agreed upon amount in order to “unglue” the book.Now, Unglue.it has announced the first ebook created under its new funding mechanism. Under the new model, the first title, Lagos_2060, was sold with its Creative Commons license in tact. As the book continues to sell, the date of the final release of the copyright will draw even closer.

There’s a lot of controversy circulating throughout the publishing industry about the pricing of ebooks, and it’s a significant topic that warrants discussion. Independent authors are rallying around the controversial 99-cent price point. Some authors feel the 99-cent price point devalues their hard work, while others feel that readers will not take a chance on new authors at a higher price point. To further complicate the matter, it’s not just new authors that are using the 99-cent strategy, and the issue doesn’t only affect independent authors, but publishing houses and agents as well.

Yes, after over 4 years of quietly ignoring the fact that their DRM was hacked, Adobe finally took a step to repair the broken lock. And as part of their effort Adobe also updated Adobe Content Server 5 (there’s also a new RMSDK), thus enabling ebookstores to provide ebooks that use the new DRM and allowing app and device developers to integrate the new DRM.

There’s this tendency among advocates to compare the absolute worst of the enemy with the perfect, best case scenario on your own side. The crowd that is hostile to self-publishing often likes to compare the worst dinosaur porn (which still sold, though, and made more money than many other titles) to one of those wonderful, Never-Neverland publishing companies that to this day invests massively in editors, doesn’t use exploitative covers, spends its untold riches on making the book’s typography absolutely perfect, has a workflow that spits out beautiful, error-free ebooks with ease, gives every author a personal PR rep, and has a multi-million dollar marketing budget for every title.Of course self-publishing looks bad when you compare it with a piece of fiction that’s less realistic than the more deranged parts of Alice in Wonderland.The reality is that book retail has been steadily deteriorating over the years and publishers themselves have been compromised by decades of cost-cutting. Most book sales are online. Titles today get much less editorial attention than similar titles did years ago. Covers have always been completely disconnected from the book’s actual content.

When you go and buy a comic book or paperback novel from your local bookstore, there is a clear understanding of ownership. You simply pay for the title, bring it home and it is yours to keep and loan out to friends as you see fit. When it comes to eBooks and digital comics the entire situation is more convoluted, 99% of the time you do not own the book you purchased, you are merely licensing it.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the February 2, 2014 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending January 18, 2014.